Six Questions for Growing Readers: Elementary, Too!

Students were all quietly reading the second-to-last chapter of Adventures with Waffles by Maria Parr. Suddenly one fifth grader gasped and started waving her arm wildly at me, “Mrs. Essenburg! Mrs. Essenburg! Oh! Oh!” When I approached her desk, she shoved her book under my nose, pointing at the sentence, “I didn’t want my best friend to go up in smoke, did I?” (222).

“She finally said it! He IS her best friend!” The student’s eyes shone. It was one of teaching's magical moments.

I happy not just for that one student’s book joy, but that my experiment with my six-question reading journal is working with elementary students. I stopped using guided chapter questions with high school students long ago. It's much more interesting to give students the strategies to find meaning in the text on their own. This, after all, is how they will read as adults, looking for the answers to their own questions, not the teacher's.  

The six questions I’m using with the 4th and 5th graders are nearly the same as what I wrote about using with 6th and 7th graders last year:

1. Summarize an important plot development
2. Observation or inference about a character
3. Choose a significant quote
4. Explain the quote’s significance
5. Visualize (sketch)
6. Ask a question or make a prediction

I started with a lot of modeling—read aloud, think aloud, and writing my journal entry on the white board—a lot more than was necessary with the 6th and 7th graders. But it’s paying off. One big misunderstanding I uncovered among students: that having questions is a bad thing. One boy proudly showed me an empty “ask a question” block, proclaiming that he didn’t have any questions—he understood everything! I explained again that asking questions is what good readers do—they wonder. Suddenly his eyes widened and he said, “Oh! Like thinking!” Later in the period I heard him explaining to his neighbor what he could put in his question box. 

The next day, when we were sharing our questions, I shared mine. The same student lit up again and burst out, “We had the same question!” pointing to his neighbor. 

It is so exciting to see students making reading strategies their own. I wonder how many will have chosen “I didn’t want my best friend to go up in smoke, did I?” for their significant quote. I can’t wait to find out.

What kind of transferrable tools do you give students for growing as readers?